


a little more careful (than of everything)

by branwyn



Series: Perspectives On A Singular Theme [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Genderswap, Siblings, girl!sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:38:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it seems to Mycroft that Sherlock is racing the world to destroy herself before it can destroy her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a little more careful (than of everything)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ee cummings.

People in Mycroft Holmes's line of work do not keep family portraits on their office desks, for a number of practical reasons. Only a small number of his colleagues and associates have been admitted to the privilege of knowing that he has living family. Fewer still know that he has a younger sister.

Only Anthea knows Sherlock's name.

Even were Mycroft inclined to breach the elevated security protocols that govern his life (he is precisely where he wishes to be, but never let it be said there is not a price to be paid) there are hardly any Holmes family portraits in existence. The four of them have not been gathered all in one place since the summer before Mycroft went to school: he was thirteen, Sherlock was six, and their mother was already pale and wasting from the disease that would kill her six months later.

It had been Sherlock, not the doctors, who first deduced that their mother was dying. After she passed, Sherlock had stopped talking for almost a year. Only Mycroft had realized, or indeed cared, that Sherlock believed that by being the first to speak the words aloud, she had in some way caused it to happen. Mycroft knows that in some small corner of his sister's heart, she blames herself still, and as he grows older, his own inability to persuade her otherwise is the one grief from his childhood that never loses its sting. It is part of the reason why he has never entirely lost patience with Sherlock, not even during the horrible five years of her addiction. Especially then, perhaps.

Mycroft knows some of the source of his sister's macerating unease in the world: her disordered childhood, so different from his own, her relentless, thrumming machine of a brain, her extraordinary beauty. She was fetching as a child, but by the age of fourteen she was a masterwork, a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life, with long pale limbs and clouds of lovely dark hair that put her delicate features into stark relief. All Mycroft's photographs of Sherlock are secured, but on display in his home is a full-scale reproduction of Rossetti's Proserpine, robed in blue, disregarding the pomegranate in her slender hand as though insensible to the fact that it was the means of imprisoning her in the underworld.

The resemblance between Sherlock and the goddess is striking, the implications troublingly symbolic.

*

When their mother died, their father disappeared, almost literally, into his work for the Foreign Office. He was always abroad, and Sherlock was left to the governance of their aging grandmother, who died just as Sherlock was preparing to go to Cheltenham. She came to Mycroft in London on holidays, and after she deliberately got herself expelled from school at fifteen they spent an uneasy eighteen months alone together. Mycroft, still in his early twenties, was pre-occupied with his career, while Sherlock was preparing herself for university under the nominal guidance of a series of tutors whom she bewildered, subdued, and dismissed one after another. Mycroft knew himself unsuited to play at being anyone's father figure, and in this one area of his life was at a loss as he never was in any other. They came to resent each other, both childish in his or her own way: Mycroft, because Sherlock made him so feel so unusually and constantly wrong-footed, because she refused to understand that, in his way, he had cherished her since the day she was born, and Sherlock because she seemed doomed to fret and pine her way through adolescence, blaming the world for being so ill-suited to reckon with her, blaming Mycroft, who by rights should have understood her better than anyone, for being unable to soothe her. To confess the truth, he was at times scarcely less unnerved by her than the brilliant academicians commissioned to oversee her education, and it was with relief that they parted a few days before her seventeenth birthday, when Sherlock went to Cambridge.

Sherlock abandoned her university career less than two years later, vanishing from view, trackable only by her financial records. Mycroft knew, from the pattern of her withdrawals, something of the life she must be leading, that it certainly involved the heavy use of drugs, but he never dared cut off her access to her trust fund. Sherlock had been heart-stoppingly reckless since she was a little girl, and as an adult with nothing to show for all her bright promise, nothing but a string of failures behind her, she cared so little for herself that she would cheerfully have slept on the streets before she submitted to any ultimatum or demand of his. The mere thought of Sherlock exposing herself in that way gave Mycroft nightmares. She was tall, but slender, observing everything, but understanding nothing, not so much easy prey as a willing target.

Sherlock's early twenties taught Mycroft the meaning of terror and helplessness. He watched from a distance as she fell apart, paralyzed by his proven ineptitude with her, by his fear of compounding the damage. Every day he considered intervening, but in the end it was she who came to him, helped by an officer of the Met with whom she was somehow acquainted. She was shattered and ghostly underneath a layer of cuts and bruises, and in a hoarse, expressionless voice, she informed him that an overdose in a flophouse had left her feeble, semi-conscious, unable to stave off the sexual predation of one of the men residing there.

Nothing, not all his exertions on her behalf during her rehabilitation, nor his watchfulness afterwards, will enable Mycroft to forget the humiliation and rage he tasted when it became inescapably clear to him that she considered him her brother still, that he might have prevented all of this, that she might well have listened to him if he had only _tried_. He vowed then that, whatever came afterward, he would never again fail her by inaction or omission. He would interfere, he would manipulate, he would scheme, but he would never again be _absent_ , and he would swallow all her resentment and scorn without an eye-blink, because it was little more than he deserved.

*

Over the years he has spent watching his sister carve her path through life, Mycroft has developed certain theories. There seems to be an inexplicable flaw to Sherlock's multi-faceted brilliance, a blind spot far more inexplicable than her lack of social skills or her inability to suit her style to her company. It lies in her refusal to acknowledge that she is, quite simply, breathtakingly beautiful--more specifically, that her beauty hovers about her like an airborne agent that alters the perceptions of everyone she knows. No one who meets Sherlock can be indifferent to her. She provokes dumbfounded admiration in some, the rage of thwarted desire in others--always extremes. If she had been a beautiful _boy_ , it would have been a different matter, she might have enjoyed the advantages to be derived from her appearance, and she would certainly have been subject to less unwanted attention. But she is too defiant to give any quarter to the world's expectations that a lovely woman should make an effort to be _pleasing_ , or to acknowledge that there were consequences for this rebellion. She persists in treats the problem as though it were not real. Some of Mycroft's first exercises in exploring the boundaries of his increasing influence were occasioned by the necessity of curtailing certain of her pursuers, because she would not take the trouble to do so herself until the danger had escalated past the point Mycroft found acceptable. The fact that she was dangerous in her own way was little comfort to him in light of the multiplicity of risks she faced--no amount of cleverness could protect her indefinitely when she continued to hurl herself into the firing line.

Sometimes it seems to Mycroft that Sherlock is racing the world to destroy herself before it can destroy her. He reflects, with keen and quiet despair, that there is a reason Sherlock is unique, because none of her extraordinary gifts remotely resemble survival traits.

Unlike other women Mycroft has studied, women who, like his sister, are both beautiful and brilliant (though none are brilliant as her), Sherlock does not seem to know how to deploy her charms strategically, how to either illuminate or downplay her appearance to suit her purposes. _Seems_ is the key word, of course, because she is a brilliant actress, _maitresse_ of mimicry and disguise, but only for her investigative work, never in her personal interests. She was always thus; Sherlock is fierce, reckless, stubborn, and scornful, and she has resented her beauty since she was old enough to perceive how people's faces lit up when they clapped eyes on her, how their expressions grew baffled, cold, or hostile as soon as she began speaking. The body is transport, she had fumed to him at sixteen; it is her mind, her brilliant jewel of a mind that makes her unique, and she loathes anything that distracts people from properly regarding the only part of herself she truly values.

Mycroft is one of few men who can ever look at Sherlock with a mind not clouded by desire and dumb animal possessiveness, but even he sometimes thinks of her as a woman (girl) first and a genius second. He would like to wrap her in soft cotton and lock her in a rosewood box to preserve her against rough handling, and he is the one person in the world who should know better, so it is little wonder she finds other people so hateful. It seems unlikely she will ever find someone who can give her what he cannot, the freedom to be exactly who she is, without condition or restraint. As closely as Mycroft watches Sherlock, he inevitably watches those who watch her, though many pass in and out of her orbit and few stick. Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Lestrade, who conducted her safely to Mycroft's home one bitter night, is the first to last any length of time, and therefore he is the the first Mycroft takes aside for a chat. It is a highly satisfactory interview, from Mycroft's perspective, and he arranges for Lestrade to be promoted on the strength of it, because the man is clearly not immune to Sherlock's magnetism, but he is bright and kind and seems to intuit that the wealth of her gifts is also a burden to her. Mycroft feels there cannot be too many people in Sherlock's life who see through her bluster and bombast to her vulnerability.

John Watson is the second of Sherlock's associates who merits a personal visit from Mycroft, and he watches, fascinated, as the doctor evaluates him and comes to a conclusion about his intentions toward Sherlock that is as erroneous as it is endearing. When he presses the question of whether or not John has decided to move into the Baker Street flat, it seems to make the man's mind up about doing so, because he informs Mycroft that if he is spotted anywhere near 221B, or Sherlock, he'll have his teeth fed to him. Of course, John learns of Mycroft and Sherlock's true relationship later the same day, and while his expression speaks both of irritation and sudden enlightenment, he and Mycroft exchange a fleeting look of mutual understanding that assures Mycroft he and the doctor are allies, in this one important matter. John has an instinct, a knack, for navigating the delicate paradox of attempting to safeguard Sherlock's person without imposing restrictions on her autonomy which she would hardly have tolerated. Mycroft suspects John is, in fact, far more adept at this than he is, because as much as Mycroft respects his sister's talents, her face is, to him, a palimpsest of every age she's ever been, infant, toddler, child, teenager, peeking through the eyes of the woman.

He will make use of his sister's talents, offer her occasional employment, make a pretense of allowing her to incur risk in his service and the service of the Crown, but to Mycroft, Sherlock will always be, first and foremost, the one creature on earth whose well-being takes precedent over any other consideration. Autonomy be damned, if needful.

*

It is quite the usual thing, Mycroft supposes, for a man to despise his sister's suitor, but the feeling is supposed to be irrational, not supported by evidence of over a dozen murders and lesser crimes. Sherlock may think that James Moriarty is something new, but Mycroft has had to remove half a dozen men just like him from Sherlock's path over the years, and only the theatricality of Moriarty's advances distinguishes him. Mycroft finds him worrying, simply because he is the first of Sherlock's stalkers to succeed in engaging her attention, being clever enough to have offered her the one thing she desires above all else--distraction. What she wants from Moriarty is understandable, if cause for concern, but what Moriarty wants from Sherlock is something Mycroft will permit no man to take from his sister.

Mycroft knows Moriarty's identity before Sherlock does, within hours of the explosion near her flat. Acting on instincts he does not fully understand, he attempts to engage Sherlock's attention himself, to break Moriarty's spell over her. He gifts her with the problem of the Bruce-Partington project, raises her security clearance, in fact, just to draw her in, but later he will come to see that he never stood a chance. To truly catch Sherlock's interest, you had to tease, her, bully her, challenge her, but to gain her whole attention, you had to hurt her, which is something he will never willingly do.

Mycroft texts her continuously over the next two days, knowing she will refuse his calls, visits her in person on three separate occasions, stays in contact with John, whose worry and unconscious jealousy are badly concealed. He attempts, delicately at first and then directly, to discuss with her the implications of her adversary's methods, but Sherlock merely plucks at her violin and levels a cold stare at him.

"Let us both play a little game of make-believe, in which we are rational creatures who can discuss the matter civilly," Mycroft is driven to say, desperation etching away at his patience.

"It _would_ be a game. You are never rational, Mycroft." This is so patently false that he dismisses it as a mere attack, until Sherlock adds, "Not where I'm concerned."

At that, Mycroft freezes slightly, no more than a hitch in his breathing, but it's as loud as a gasp to the two of them. Because she is right. Where Sherlock is concerned, reason is a tool, never the goal in itself.

He has that much in common with Moriarty, at least.

*

He is running toward the building, running into flame and smoke and crumbling mortar, breathing through the handkerchief clasped to his face, running as he has not run since he was a boy, chasing after Sherlock, who at seven had flung herself from her bedroom window in a fit of pique and was trailing blood over the garden cobblestones as she fled--

At first he thinks he is stumbling because he is near unconsciousness from smoke inhalation, but then he realizes he is entangled, someone is grasping his arm and tugging him backwards. Mycroft turns, old and despised but necessary training in fieldwork combat fueling muscle memory, and he has the man by the throat, gasping, before he registers that he is familiar.

He releases Lestrade, who sucks in a deep breath and immediately starts coughing, but he doesn't back off. "What the hell are you doing here?" he rasps. And then a horrified light dawns in his eyes, and he isn't slow on the uptake but he is too slow for this, when seconds matter, when all that matters is finding Sherlock, because she is alone, with John, maybe, but not _him_ , and he had _sworn_ that would not happen a second time--

"It's Sherlock, isn't it?" says Lestrade, and Mycroft nods once, and then they are both running into a tunnel of black soot and shadows and the eerie light of fire reflected in dancing green water.

When they win through to the open space of the pool atrium, Mycroft's heart becomes a fist, because there is too much to see here, too many scars on the topography, too much contradictory data to parse in the space of time it would take for Sherlock to bleed out from shrapnel. He staggers to a halt, a hand clasped to his waistcoat, but Lestrade pushes past him to the edge of the pool, and then Mycroft's vision clears and resolves and he sees the dark shapes bobbing in the water, black against the illumination, and he begins to calculate the number of minutes that might pass before a drowning victim can be revived undamaged (but she is damaged already, or she wouldn't be here, and it is his fault)--

Lestrade shouts, unintelligible but plain in his meaning: he requires assistance. Mycroft is moving again before he's aware he is doing so. His eyes are better adjusted to the dimness now; he can just see John's blackened, bleeding face, one arm threaded through the railing of the ladder, the other clutching Sherlock under the arms. She is floating in the water, her white face blank, her dark hair unspooled and undulating on the surface of the water, Ophelia in the weedy stream, and he thinks, _this is the poison of deep grief._ John's eyes are closed as well, and he does not seem to be conscious, but his muscles are locked around the two things grounding him to life, and when this is over, if they all survive, Mycroft is going to knight him.

Lestrade extricates Sherlock from John's unrelenting grip, and Mycroft, kneeling, hauls her out of the water, hardly feeling the exertion though he registers with clinical distance the disused muscles tearing in his back and shoulders, knowing he will burn for this later. He should help secure John next, but the moment he has Sherlock there is no question of letting her go again, and he holds up her head so that her mouth is next to his ear and he does not breathe until he hears her breathing, shallow but sweet as nothing in his life will ever feel again. He turns back to Lestrade, to assist with John if necessary, but Lestrade has managed on his own, and together they shoulder their burdens, stumbling, until other hands reach for them.

*

Mycroft and Lestrade are both detained by paramedics, something Mycroft would never have allowed if he were in his right senses, but he is high, higher than Sherlock ever was, floating on relief and oxygen deprivation. They are all four taken to the hospital, and when Mycroft extricates himself from the doctors, he goes striding into Sherlock's room, to find Lestrade already occupying the chair at her bed, already grasping her hand.

Lestrade looks up at him and stands, wordlessly, stepping into the hall and pulling the door to behind him. Mycroft walks to the end of the bed. He is in control of himself once more. His footsteps are slow and measured, rather than dragging. His hands do not shake, or at least, their shaking is disguised by the tremors sweeping him from head to foot. Lying against the white hospital sheets, Sherlock looks not unlike she had looked in the water, as though she is floating, her hair dry now but pooled around her head, like she's falling backward into a dark cloud. Mycroft takes three steps and reaches for her hand, then hesitates. He cannot remember the last time Sherlock permitted him to touch her. Not since the night Lestrade brought her home to him, perhaps, after she'd spent an hour talking herself hoarse, inflectionless, like she was describing events that had happened to someone else, only to crumble abruptly in mid-sentence, Mycroft catching her just before her knees struck the floor.

"They tell me you will live, and recover," he says to her sleeping form. "John as well. I am glad you retained him. He saved you tonight. Detective Inspector Lestrade, as well." Mycroft looks aside. "I, as usual, was not called upon to do a hand's turn in the matter."

He stands there silently for another few minutes, listening to the steady pulse of the monitors. Then he turns, precisely, seats himself in the chair, and steeples his fingers on his knee. He taps his foot, then reaches out and covers Sherlock's hand with his. It is frigid. He stands again, leaning over the bed, and catches her other hand as well, so they can both be warmed.

There is a house in the Sussex countryside which belongs to their family. It lies on the downs, near the coast, with a garden and an orchard, and, curiously, an apiary maintained by the caretaker, who is a hobbyist in the subject of bee-keeping. Mycroft had considered confining Sherlock there during her rehabilitation, but had chosen to keep her in his home instead, because the cottage was intended as a refuge, and he knew that, any place she had ever been held, she would come to hate. He wants to keep the door of any refuge he can open to her. The great wish of his life is that she will live long enough to grow tired, and long for rest and security, so that at last there will be something she needs that he can give her.

He could arrange for Sherlock to wake in that Sussex cottage tomorrow morning--or the next day, or two hours from now, whenever she opens her eyes again. He could send John with her; he's not so badly hurt, as it turns out, and with professional assistance they could manage there through their convalescence. Sherlock would be furious, too weak to fend him off, compelled to submit to his protection, but it might be worth it.

For a moment, Mycroft holds the idea close, imagining how it would feel to go about the business of his life with that little thrum of satisfied relief supporting him, knowing Sherlock was finally, finally safe. But a thought comes to him--a bitter thought that won't be dislodged, which suggests it carries the weight of a fact. If neither his absence nor his interference in Sherlock's life have sufficed to keep her from harm, perhaps nothing will. Perhaps he is powerless. Certainly, he could shroud her in soft linen, if he wished, and put her in a box, but then he might as well lower that box into the ground. She would be very safe there indeed.

The fact is that, as long as Sherlock lives, the condition of her life is risk. And as long as he loves his sister, the condition of Mycroft's life is a certain measure of fear, and helplessness.

There are two means of escaping this paradox, but they are both unacceptable.

*

Sherlock wakes twelve hours later. Mycroft is there in her hospital room when she opens her eyes, pale slits of blue like seawater between dark lashes. Mycroft stands and leans over the side of the bed, so she can see him. Wordlessly, he gives her a cup of water, and she drinks through the straw.

"Don't try to talk," he says. And then, to encourage her obedience, he tells her the answers to all the questions he knows she will try to ask. When he stops talking, he's surprised how long her silence lasts. He cannot tell if her vague expression has been brought on by the morphine, or if she is simply thoughtful.

"Should have called you," she whispers at last. "Sorry."

Mycroft's breath catches in his throat. His hand tightens around Sherlock's, almost involuntarily. He shuts his eyes for half a second.

"Had you done so, I would certainly have answered," he says.

The twitch of her lips is almost a smile. The warmth that floods his body is probably foreboding, because he can picture clearly the day he will stand by her bed, and take hold of her hand, and find it far colder than it is now. But today is not that day, so there is also gratitude.


End file.
